


Flash Fire

by CuteCat213



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Drabble Collection, Emotional Hurt, Flash Fic, Gen, Past Tense, Present Tense, Zuko (Avatar)-centric, Zuko's Scar (Avatar)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26708254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CuteCat213/pseuds/CuteCat213
Summary: Chapter 1: It's sometime, a year into his banishment, that Zuko gets his last piece of mail.Chapter 2: The royal family is Fire, and fire--Chapter 3: Zuko's scar marks the people around him as much as it marks him.Chapter 4: At thirteen, Zuko's voice doesn't sound like a child's.(Flash fic almost-drabbles about Zuko.)
Relationships: Zuko & Zuko's Crew (Avatar)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 69





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If armadillo-tigers are a thing, you can pry pangolin-lions from my cold, dead hands.

Zuko's hand shakes around the missive he’s holding, but he doesn’t crumple the paper in his fist. He’d done that before, the first few times, unable to control himself.

He’d spent hours smoothing them out in his room afterward. Slow, careful, controlled motions.

He takes a breath and doesn’t set the missive on fire. He’d done that, too, at first.

He’d requisitioned copies, after.

Now he’s used to the terrible hitch in his breathing before he forces it to steady. The sharp pain in his chest and the way every fire source on the ship flickers for just a moment.

Slowly, with careful, practiced motions, he flattens the missive, memorizes the name it holds, and puts it in a drawer with all the (many, many, _many_ ) others.

Casualty reports.

He gets up, turns away from everything in his room, and screams.

Fire roars.

And roars and _roars_. Roars like a tigerdillo, like an entire pride of pangolions, like _dragons_. Roars until the steel in front of him glows bright yellow and dull, sullen red. 

When he stops screaming (stops roaring), he collapses to his knees and presses his forehead to the floor.

The last of the 41st division is dead.

Zuko will have to write to his family. Like he’s written to all the others.

(He cries.)


	2. Chapter 2

Azula burns cold. Like ice-burn. Like lightning.

Which means Father should burn cold, too. Because lightning.

(But he doesn’t. Zuko _knows_ he doesn’t, Zuko knows—)

Father burns hot, like—

(Hothothot against his face hot _burning_ —)

Father burns hot.

Zuko's not sure he burns at all.

(Except all the times he does, burns burns burns down to ashes until there’s nothing left _to_ burn.)

Zuko burns.


	3. Six Seconds

He didn’t do it often—it would probably destroy him or drive him insane or worst of all break him in some unnamable way he hadn’t broken quite yet. But _sometimes_ … Sometimes, Zuko lay awake in that darkest hour, just before dawn, and he wondered who his scar marked more clearly: himself… or everyone else.

No matter how bad he usually was at reading people, no matter how hard someone tried to hide or suppress their reaction, that first second they saw the left side of his face also gave him a glimpse right down into their soul.

Not even his sister had been immune to it, that pre-dawn in the infirmary where she’d unwrapped his face with such unusually-gentle fingers and pulled the gauze away. And Zuko had seen it in her eyes for that single instant. For the first time in her life, Azula had known the fear of failure. Fear of their father.

Zuko had seen hundreds of first-looks and hundreds of souls bared for hundreds of single seconds since that first first for them both.

Looks of pity and looks of horror and looks of painful vindication. 

The looks of disgust were particularly bad.

The looks of desire were so much worse.

Uncle’s single second had been sorrow. Sorrow and such deep, painful grief that it had rivaled the loss of Lu Ten. Zuko would never forget that second.

The Avatar's single second had been blank incomprehension, because he was twelve and could not even imagine a world where scars like Zuko’s existed, with all their implications.

The Water Tribe boy's, grim assessment, a potential weakness picked out and marked.

The waterbender's, confused disbelief, a mind scrambling to understand. Understand how a firebender could burn, understand the cause of the scar, the extent of the wound. Untrained, but still, ultimately, a healer's assessment.

(In the depths of his memory and deep down in the shadows of his soul, where he hid all the most painful, broken bits of himself where no one could see, he remembered Father standing at the door of the sick room, outlined in the light from the sconces in the hall as Uncle stopped him from entering. Catching sight of him over Uncle's shoulder, limned in firelight. He’d been smirking.)


	4. Chapter 4

Their commanding officer didn’t sound like a thirteen-year-old boy. 

His voice was loud and while it broke and cracked, it wasn’t because it was attempting to go through six different octaves in the course of a single word.

It was because he had to break off to cough.

The voice wasn’t high and sweet like a child’s voice. It was rough and raspy and it dragged from his throat like a marlin-shark being harpooned and pulled into a fishing boat, bleeding and fighting the entire way.

It was smoke-rough. Heat- _damaged_. Not like a child kept back away safely behind the walls of a palace. It sounded like every veteran everyone had known or had _been_.

Like a frontline firebender, who got caught up in the thick of the war and the battles and the _people_. In the soot and smoke of burning villages and burning flesh and all the ruin the aftermath entailed.

It sounded like ash and scorched ground as it cracked and caught in his throat.

The thirteen-year-old crown prince didn’t sound like a child.

Voice smokey and burning, their commanding officer sounded like kindling.


End file.
